Bypass Office installation

[DecimalTurn]

There are a lot of tools developed by @Beakerboy that could be used to build VBA projects without having to use Office.
Those projects are taking the approach of compiling the vbaProject.bin file that the Office application generates normally.

Example implementation for an Excel Addin (.xlam):
https://github.com/Beakerboy/VBA-CI-CD-Test/blob/dev/.github/workflows/build_addin.yml

[Beakerboy]

The visual basic part is very complicated. Creating a file that includes Visual Basic code requires special encryption techniques, as well as packaging the encrypted code into OLE containers, and then creating a very specific zip file. The packages I have are still kind of buggy, but I am totally open to more people helping and looking at the code.

[DecimalTurn]

Yeah, I know this isn't a small task but it seems that your projects have made a lot of progress towards something that could be functional.

Are the current bugs documented somewhere?

[Beakerboy]

I use the GitHub issues queue for everything.

[WilliamSmithEdward]

@DecimalTurn https://github.com/WilliamSmithEdward/pyOpenVBA seems like an easy win here. Let me know if I can help.

[WilliamSmithEdward]

@DecimalTurn Also check out https://github.com/WilliamSmithEdward/pyVBAanalysis

You have my full blessing / support.

[DecimalTurn]

WilliamSmithEdward/pyOpenVBA seems like an easy win here. Let me know if I can help.

@WilliamSmithEdward thanks for chiming in. This in certainly a hard problem and the more people we can have trying to solve it, the more chances we have to get there. pyOpenVBA has indeed caught my interest and I've already raised an issue based on early testing. I'm not ready to say that we can completely get rid of Office to generate VBA binaries, but this is clearly promising!

[WilliamSmithEdward]

@DecimalTurn Thanks for the consideration. I'll take a look at that issue as soon as I can.

[WilliamSmithEdward]

@DecimalTurn

Issue closed: WilliamSmithEdward/pyOpenVBA#1
CI PR merged: WilliamSmithEdward/pyOpenVBA#4

Looking forward to working with you further. 🤝